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Malcolm Gladwell on Late Bloomers


Stashed in: #inspiration, Creativity, Art!, Late Bloomers, Mark Twain, @gladwell

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Malcolm Gladwell writes:

Mark Twain was the same way. Galenson quotes the literary critic Franklin Rogers on Twain's trial-and-error method: "His routine procedure seems to have been to start a novel with some structural plan which ordinarily soon proved defective, whereupon he would cast about for a new plot which would overcome the difficulty, rewrite what he had already written, and then push on until some new defect forced him to repeat the process once again." Twain fiddled and despaired and revised and gave up on "Huckleberry Finn" so many times that the book took him nearly a decade to complete.

The Cezannes of the world bloom late not as a result of some defect in character, or distraction, or lack of ambition, but because the kind of creativity that proceeds through trial and error necessarily takes a long time to come to fruition.

Not everyone is at their peak when they are young.

Trial-and-error creativity is the superpower of late bloomers.

gives me hope

What age do you consider to be late, Jared?

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